The first to attack was the cavalry wing, but by this time a third of the horses were already foaming at the mouth of the day's running. Out of caution, Mutaguchi did not dare to put the infantry in immediately. He was haunted by Chu Tingchang's elusiveness, and he also had lingering palpitations. The cavalry began to launch a tentative attack on the enemy's possible retreat routes, and several encounters were fought, mostly enemy convoys, and the Chinese troops used flares to frighten the horses, and then retreated, and the counterattack was perfunctory. The cavalry unit found that the enemy had left carts with empty gasoline drums, and it seemed that they had gone to the nearby abandoned British barracks to look for fuel, but it backfired and found nothing.

Mutaguchi let down his vigilance and ordered the 48th Infantry Wing not to rest and immediately attack, at this time it had been almost 24 hours since they left the city yesterday. During the day, the soldiers were exposed to the scorching sun, many of them peeled off their skins, drank dirty water that had not had time to be disinfected, and the food was only a few rice balls. But the officers still cheered up the soldiers, saying that winning the battle would definitely play a decisive role. Therefore, all of them must carry forward the divine power of the imperial army and take down the strong enemy in one go.

Since the Burma Campaign, the soldiers have been constantly subjected to similar pre-war agitation, each time it is the same, nothing more than that this battle is of great importance, and the first war can determine the overall situation; But having said so many times, the Chinese army is still resisting, and no battle can bring down the overall situation. In fact, the Chinese army has been retreating, from Burma to India, but it is gradually increasing in strength, which is indeed obvious to all. Take the troops of this old rival Chu Tingchang as an example, the 18th Division has never been bargained. According to the statistics of the Burma campaign held by the general staff of the division and regiment, there were seven or eight thousand casualties in Burma, and a large part of them were due to the composite regiment of Commander Chu Ting.

However, the Japanese soldiers were still full of pride as "the first infantry in the world" and went into battle without hesitation. In the middle of the night, people began to have diarrhea, and the water of the Ganges River worked very quickly. Before the fierce fighting, the attrition of the troops due to heat stroke and diarrhea was already very serious.

However, the news from the front line is gratifying, the Chinese army resisted very slightly, only retreated as soon as the battle was engaged, and did not invest heavy weapons. Morita squadron even captured an enemy tank during the pursuit. When they attacked the village, the tank stopped at the intersection and used machine guns to stop the Japanese attack. The squadron leader ordered the soldiers to take advantage of the night to outflank the tea plantation, and the soldiers went around to the side and were about to blow up the tank with *, only to find that there was no one inside. The Chinese troops suddenly lost their fighting spirit, threw down their tanks and fled. There is still some ammunition left in the tank, but the gasoline is gone, which should be the reason why it can't go.

Mutaguchi became more and more aware that his judgment was correct and that the enemy was swallowing the consequences of superstitious mechanization. Perhaps they were overly optimistic during the attack on the railway station and allocated all the last fuel to the tanks, resulting in a lack of supplies. It seems that it was the right thing to do on its own, and it was very timely. If he hadn't cut off the enemy's supply lines himself, maybe by the morning those difficult tanks would have been able to move again.

He stood on the ridge with his hands crossed, surrounded by a group of staff officers, and the mosquitoes kept swooping down and biting, making him unable to guard against it, but it was still difficult to hide the excitement in his heart.

"Division commander, the 56th Division has arrived at the designated position, and we have roughly cut off all the enemy's retreats." Chief of Staff Yasuo Mitsuhashi said.

"It is necessary to launch a surprise attack overnight, taking advantage of the enemy's panic at night, and compress the enemy's space first. When the artillery arrives during the day, it will be easy to do. ”

"yes, I didn't expect it to be so easy. The day before yesterday, their attack was still very fierce, and they were ...... all at once No more. ”

"Hehe, this is where that Chu Tingchang is not careful. If I can capture this man alive, I must ask him, why do I think that my imperial army does not have the ability to run long distances and cut off his retreat? ”

"What does the commander think?" Mihashi is good at figuring out the intentions and knows what the division commander has.

"I have studied infantry tactics for decades, and I know that the core of combat is always people, not weapons, and even less machines."

Everyone around nodded their heads.

"Soldiers can still be tired and can still stimulate combat effectiveness, cattle can be whipped, there are only emotionless machines, once there is no oil, what do you do it is indifferent, so for the generals, we must be vigilant and value the supply of weapons and materials, and despise the soldiers' point of view."

"That's what the division commander said."

"When our army was in the Philippines, it was found that when the US soldiers consumed materials, our army was several times that of our army, and the cars were more than dozens of times, but the combat effectiveness was less than a fraction of our army, so it can be seen that the supply of materials has nothing to do with combat effectiveness.

The drone was hovering in the air, and it was impossible to determine whether the people in the circle below were the division headquarters, although Lin Xiuxuan was 90% sure that Mu Tiankou was in this group of people, because this place was the closest to the communication unit, and there were people constantly going back and forth with the communication squadron, but it was still not 100% certain. In addition, Chu Tingchang asked to drop the bomb at a critical moment, and it seems that it has not yet reached that moment.

The Japanese offensive began to meet with stubborn resistance, and the Chinese army resisted by relying on several villages and surrounding ditches. Several of the main squadrons of the 48th Wing rushed several times, but they were all brought back by intensive fire.

When the news reached Mutaguchi, he was sure that he had caught a big fish in the big net he had spread. The enemy command did not slip through its own fingers. The blitzkrieg that he fought on his own two legs left the enemy defenseless. The electronic reconnaissance unit once again confirmed that the enemy's dense radio emission sources were in their encirclement.

The headquarters of the 15th Army in Sittwe also had no one to sleep, and Kimura saw that the supply fleet was repeatedly attacked and could not send the baggage, but the loyal and brave soldiers in front had no food or drink, no ammunition replenishment, and they were stunned to fight a beautiful battle.

The deciphered communications of the 200th Division were sent to Kimura's desk in a steady stream. They were all distress calls, asking Vivier for help, and Sun Liren for help. It can be seen that this vicious Chu Pavilion Chief is finally finished.

At the same time, Vivel of Ranchi also felt that a great disaster was coming, because Chu Tingchang kept sending him distress telegrams, one letter every 20 minutes, which was more dense than when he asked the Chinese army for help, and some of them were not encrypted. These days, his attention has been on the besieged Canadian troops, and yesterday he also heard that the Chinese troops were on the periphery, and they would not be rescued when they saw death, but they did not expect that the report of the present world would come so quickly, and they themselves would be surrounded. Looking at it, the Chu Pavilion chief that Stilwell values is actually exaggerated.

Vevel didn't reply to Chu Tingchang's telegram at all, why send a telegram to a dying man?

He sent a telegram to London overnight, asking the Prime Minister to consider very seriously the possibility of the imminent loss of all of India, and he suggested that the 4th Army abandon Ranchi and retreat to Bihar, and that if the Egyptian Eighth Army was transferred, it might be able to form a new line of defense after retreating to Bihar. Of course, he knew that Montgomery's main force could not be transferred, but he just wanted to use this topic to implicitly tell the prime minister that India was about to die.

After sending the above telegram, he sent another telegram to Stilwell in Chongqing, asking him to coordinate with Chiang and transfer Sun Liren's troops to immediately carry out a diversionary counterattack, disrupt the Japanese army's movements, and wait for the support of the British army on the mainland. Of course, this telegram is also a repeat of the old trick, hoping that Sun Liren can drag the Japanese army to some extent, so that Slim's people can take the opportunity to retreat.

At this moment, he began to regret the battle he had launched for the sake of those mere gold, but he didn't expect this to happen. However, the order to recover the gold was given by the prime minister, and he did not have to pay all the responsibility.

Stilwell, who was far away in Chongqing, was still tearing up Chiang Kai-shek's model troops with Chu Tingchang's model troops during the day, talking about the idea of a Chinese army armed with American-style equipment, hoping that Chiang Kai-shek would provide enough good soldiers, instead of being thin, old, weak, sick and disabled to perfunctory himself. Unexpectedly, the third watch was called up by his entourage in the middle of the night, saying that something big had happened in India. The British and Chinese troops were besieged. He couldn't figure out what was going on, and Vivier's attack was the result of a private exchange with Chu Tingchang, and he didn't inform him.

Stilwell was anxious and immediately asked to see Jiang, wanting to discuss the transfer of Sun Liren's rescue affairs, but he did not see Jiang. Chiang Kai-shek's chamber felt that it was still a problem to be surrounded by a division? How can you bother the president for this little thing, otherwise the president won't sleep every day,

Stilwell, who was in the fog, returned to his residence in a huff and sent a telegram to Vivier, asking him to meet the Chinese army, and Vivier had to send planes to airdrop gasoline to the designated area of the 200th Division.

Chu Tingchang hid in the headquarters and constantly sent reports to various places, deliberately using codes that could be deciphered by the Japanese army, and the telegram talked about the deployment of troops, the shortage of ammunition, and the shortage of fuel. The Royal Air Force was repeatedly asked to drop fuel overnight.

He knew that this was the most direct signal that could get Mutaguchi to take the bait. He had to get the Japanese out of the fortified city on their own, and then fight him in the field. In order to act more realistically, he also threw a tank that was damaged beyond repair to the Japanese.

In fact, he has always been very vigilant about fuel stocks, never falling below two bases. He knew that he had to pay attention to these factors when he was in control of mechanization, how could he make such a pediatric mistake?

Before the British airdropped gasoline, the Chinese troops withdrew from the airdrop site in accordance with the order, pretending to be defeated. Thousands of gallons of gasoline fell into the hands of the Japanese army. This information was immediately fed back to Mutaguchi, and he knew that the allies had messed up and had dropped gasoline by air, and even if they got it, it would be a drop in the bucket.

At dawn, the Japanese army dragged in more than a dozen infantry guns and anti-aircraft guns and began to launch a full-scale attack, and the Chinese army used tanks as fixed fire points to counterattack, repelling several Japanese attacks. The Royal Air Force came out of the air to fight the Japanese planes over the battlefield, and the Japanese planes came from afar, unable to seize air supremacy, and once the air battle weakened slightly, the British fighters swooped down and strafed the Japanese forces below.

In the morning of fighting, the Japanese suffered heavy losses, leaving more than a thousand corpses in front of the positions of the Chinese troops. In defensive warfare, Chu Tingchang does not play fake, and the ferocity of his troops' direct fire is not something that can be shaken by a lightly armed unit with just a few infantry guns and mortars. However, the drone has been tracking the movements of the enemy's heavy artillery units, and the artillery wing of the 19th Division has also towed 150 field guns this time.